As more college courses on sexuality crop up across the country, so do the complaints from students that professors have taken it too far. Hugo Schwyzer, a professor who teaches about gender and sexuality, explains why he’ll never ask his students about their sexual habits.
As college courses on sexuality proliferate, professors across the country are increasingly finding themselves in trouble because of what they’ve shown, asked, or assigned. In separate incidents in April, instructors at Fresno State in California and Appalachian State in North Carolina were each placed on leave, accused of showing “objectionable” sexual material to their students. Last year, a professor at Northwestern University got in trouble for hosting a live sex demonstration (which was optional for students to attend).
It’s not just videos or live presentations that have attracted controversy. Earlier this month, a student at Western Nevada College claimed that her human sexuality professor required students to share their sexual histories in journals, papers, and class discussions. According to Inside Higher Education, “students were asked to describe different types of orgasms and describe how they sexually stimulate themselves, specifically referring to certain parts of the female anatomy.” The professor, Tom Kubistant, promised not to read the explicit journal entries, claiming he would only “scan” his students’ scribblings to make sure they’d actually covered the topic. A federal complaint has been filed against Dr. Kubistant.
As a community college prof who offers a variety of courses on gender and sexuality, I’ve followed these stories closely. With more than 20 years of teaching at the high school, university, and two-year college level, I’ve had plenty of opportunity to reflect on the issue of boundaries both in and out of the classroom. When the subject is as explosive as sex, how do we strike a balance between safety and intellectual inquiry? Err too much on the side of the former, and the opportunity for the latter is crippled; err too much on the side of adventurousness, and there’s real potential for unhelpful, even destructive, student discomfort.
This past spring, I offered a new course with more explicit content than any I’d taught since I came to Pasadena City College. I called the class “Navigating Pornography,” because I wanted it to be an interdisciplinary approach to one of the most explosive and ubiquitous subjects of our time. The students read a variety of historical and critical analyses of porn, wrote four papers, and heard from five different guest speakers—including adult actresses Kelly Shibari and Alana Evans.
One thing I didn’t do in the class was actually show porn. Though some of the texts for the course featured explicit photos, I chose to forego showing X-rated videos to my students. I did ask the kids to watch porn on their own time; just in case any had objections, I offered an alternative assignment that didn’t involve looking at erotica. (Out of a class of 47 students, only two chose that alternative.)
I didn’t make the decision not to show porn in class out of fear of getting into trouble with the administration. I have a long-standing and well-deserved reputation on campus as a troublemaker, but my tenure is ironclad. Had I wanted to show porn in class, I could have done so without fear of discipline. I chose not to show it because I honor its power to arouse, to disgust, and to discomfit. And while good professors should provoke their students intellectually, I’m also convinced that they should have a reverence for students’ emotional safety in the classroom.
Whether they watch it daily or have never seen it, I wanted my students to rethink how our society talks about (or more accurately, doesn’t talk about) porn. As part of that journey, I expected them to reflect on their own sexual values, behavior, and identities. I assumed that some were turned on by what they read, what they heard, or what they watched for class, just as I assume that others may have been shaken or even revolted. But unlike Dr. Kubistant, I don’t think it’s ever a professor’s job to serve as a witness to a student’s sexual journey.
Because one of the primary purposes of porn is to serve as fodder for masturbation, we talked quite a bit in class about self-stimulation. We noted that many of those who are most hostile to pornography, particularly on the religious right, are also anti-masturbation; we discussed the way in which visual erotica can both liberate from and intensify the shame some people feel around masturbation. But I never asked my students “to describe how they sexually stimulate themselves.”
The safest places to talk about sex are—not entirely paradoxically—those that are desexualized. When students know that they won’t be mocked, won’t have their privacy invaded, and won’t be the subject of a professor’s prurient interest, they are able to do what we so rarely do in our culture: discuss sex candidly and (almost) fearlessly. The need to feign an insouciance or expertise that they don’t actually feel can slip away. The more students know that their boundaries are respected, the more comfortable they’ll be sharing their stories and listening non-judgmentally to those of their classmates.
Though I never showed porn to my students, there was one instance where I did bring open sexual energy into the classroom. The last guest speaker I brought in during the semester was Rachel Cherwitz, a teacher with One Taste, the San Francisco-based outfit that offers classes in Orgasmic Meditation. I brought Rachel in because of One Taste’s embrace of “slow sex,” which offers a radical alternative to the mainstream porn culture that focuses on “getting off” as rapidly as possible.
Though Rachel kept her clothes on and there were no live demonstrations, the richly descriptive language she used in her guest lecture was unmistakably erotic. Sitting where I was, behind Rachel, I could see the unmistakable signs of both arousal and shock on the faces of my students. After three months of analyzing pornography, law, psychology, and culture, they were finally confronted with the reality of a sexually charged classroom. In our next meeting, we discussed what that experience was like. “I felt like I needed a cold shower,” one young woman volunteered to much laughter and nods of empathetic agreement. Several other students pointed out that it was both exciting and unnerving to be collectively turned on in class. They were grateful that I hadn’t brought Rachel in earlier in the semester; only once we’d established an atmosphere of mutual trust could we risk bringing eros so obviously into the classroom. That trust was built on a sense that students’ emotional and sexual boundaries would always be respected.
There’s no question that human sexual behavior (including pornography) is a worthwhile—even essential—subject for academic inquiry. I want those whom I teach to have sex (alone or with others) that leaves them feeling affirmed, relieved, excited, and free from doubt and shame. Yet professors who teach subjects like this never have the right to ask for details of the pleasure for which we advocate. If we’re doing our jobs right, our students will almost certainly apply what they’ve learned in their own private lives. When, where, and how they do that is not ours to ask or to know.
Hugo Schwyzer has taught history and gender studies at Pasadena City College since 1993, where he developed the college’s first courses on Men and Masculinity and Beauty and Body Image. A writer and speaker as well as a professor, Hugo lives with his wife, daughter, and son in Los Angeles. Hugo blogs at his eponymous website and co-authored the recent autobiography of supermodel Carré Otis, Beauty, Disrupted. You can find him on Twitter at @hugoschwyzer.
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